• “A Bible-infused curriculum that Texas approved for public schools over pushback in 2024 will undergo corrections to fix hundreds of errors caught by teachers and education officials after the material was introduced to classrooms.”
I’d bet it’s not just teachers and school officials catching all those mistakes in the textbooks pushed by the Bible-as-spellbook Christian nationalists. I’ll bet it’s also students.
When I was in junior high school, the private fundamentalist Christian school I went to briefly switched to using Beka Books in middle-school science classes. The school was creationist, so using textbooks from the creationists at Pensacola Bible College seemed like it should be a good fit, but those books were awful even by fundie creationist standards.
Once students realized the textbook was full of errors, there was blood in the water. Understand, we were in seventh grade and had all been raised to be little fundies. That meant that we had all been trained since preschool in the art of hostile, aggressively chapter-and-verse reading. And also that we were all jumping at the chance to finally rebel a bit against authority. We attacked those books like we were fact-checkers at the New Yorker.
The most awkwardly exciting days in that classroom involved Galileo and Bigfoot. The textbook’s discussion of Galileo’s famous gravity experiment suggested repeating his demonstration using a brick and a feather. A bunch of us brought some particularly fluttery feathers to class that day to score points against that hated textbook.
That was a bad day for the Pensacola-grad teacher who’d championed those Beka books, but it was a better day than the one when we got to the book’s photograph of the Loch Ness Monster, which it offered as scientific evidence that humans and dinosaurs co-existed and that the “behemoth” described in the book of Job must have been a dinosaur.
This was the 1980s and we didn’t have the internet, but we did have the library, and those Time-Life books, and Leonard Nimoy’s In Search Of …, and we were thrilled to find our juvenile interest in cryptozoology was paying off.
If pictures of Nessie counted as evidence that humans lived with dinosaurs, we asked, did pictures of Sasquatch count as evidence of a missing link? That was a fun day at school. After that, our school decided to stop using Beka Books.
And, also, at least one of my classmates was no longer allowed to watch The Six Million Dollar Man.
All of which is to say that I hope school students in Texas find the same joy and excitement eviscerating their new, Republican-approved “Bluebonnet” indoctrination manuals that we got to experience shredding those Beka Books. Have at it kids. It’s open season.
• Paul Campos quotes from Orwell’s essay on Charles Dickens. This is the truest, purest form of blogging. All the best blogs quite this essay at least twice a year.
• “Tennessee grandmother jailed after AI facial recognition error links her to fraud”
Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software. … In July, US marshals arrested Lipps at her Tennessee home while she was babysitting four children. She said she was taken away at gunpoint and booked into a county jail as a fugitive from justice from North Dakota.
Being booked as a fugitive, she was held without bail and sat in a Tennessee jail for four months before North Dakota authorities extradited her in October.
Lipps was later released on Christmas Eve after [her attorney] obtained her bank records and presented them to investigators. The records showed Lipps was more than 1,200 miles away in Tennessee at the time investigators said the fraud occurred in Fargo.
But Lipps said Fargo police did not pay for her trip home, leaving her stranded. … While jailed and unable to pay bills, Lipps lost her home, her car and her dog, she said.
The “A.I.” doesn’t work and the cops don’t care. So Angela Lipps loses everything. And, somewhere in North Dakota, the actual fraudster is still ripping people off, undisturbed by any of the “A.I.” used in lieu of real police work.
• “Fortunately, as the story also notes, meteorite strikes do tend to be covered by insurance.” Charles Kuffner rounds up the local reporting on the shooting star that recently shot at somebody’s house in Texas.
• Jesus Christ, Superstar — Kathryn Post writes about The Chosen and the swords-and-sandals revival that’s become a staple of streaming TV.
Post highlights The House of David, on Amazon Prime, which shouldn’t be confused with David: King of Israel on Fox Nation. Big opportunity for Bravo to get I on this Davidic action with a “Real Housewives” series where all of the women are married to the same guy. Plus maybe a “Real Concubines of David and Absalom” spin-off with the ten sex-slaves the biblical king had imprisoned in a sealed-up palace. (Talk about your texts of terror.)
The team behind the hit Chosen is also producing a series called Joseph of Egypt, based on the the arch-villain from the final chapters of the book of Genesis. The tale of Joseph is a Genesis story, one of many ancient origin-stories in that book that suggest how the world came to be.
The ancient world was full of imperial kings who ruled as tyrannical gods. How did that come about? Well, in the beginning, there was a pharaoh and his adviser, and there was a big famine coming. The adviser counseled the pharaoh to hoard all the world’s food ahead of the famine and then, when everyone was starving and desperate, use that food to buy every person’s land and freedom.
With Joseph’s foresight, the pharaoh could have used all that food to save his starving people, earning their undying love and gratitude and respect. But Joseph had other plans — an absolute monarchy and an empire of slavery. Joseph is the guy who invented totalitarian dictatorship. Joseph invented Josef.
I’m guessing that story — the actual story in the actual Bible — probably won’t be the one told on Joseph of Egypt.
But if Joseph turns out to be as big a success as Superstar, I can’t wait to see what the studio behind The Chosen turns to next. Cats? Phantom? Evita? … Starlight Express?
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